The Guys from MSN
Who are they?  What do they want?

These characters have been appearing rather a lot on the Microsoft website of late. They seem particularly associated with .NET and internet communications software.

I even found one (pictured below) lurking in the background of one of Microsoft's pages. The image looks odd because the original was faded-out so as to be barely noticable and I enhanced the image in an art package afterwards.

Update (2005-Sep-17). I found the 'hatchery', from which all Guys from MSN come...

At this point, if you're anything like me, you'll have noticed—yes, that's it, you're not hallucinating. That is a Microsoft Word icon with the Word 'W' upside-down. I currently have no idea what that is used for (or for matter whether Microsoft know someone has been putting retarded icons into their resource files...).